My Affairs A MEMOIR OF THE MAGAZINE INDUSTRY (2016-2076) N.J. Robinson Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean-steamer, the rail- way, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come… In 1850, science would have smiled at such a romance as this, but, in 1900, as far as history could learn, few men of science thought it a laughing matter. — The Education of Henry Adams I was emerging from these conferences amazed and exalted, con- vinced, one might say. It seemed to me that I traveled through Les Champs Elysées in a carriage pulled by two proud lions, turned into anti-lions, sweeter than lambs, only by the harmonic force; the dolphins and the whales, transformed into anti-dolphins and into anti-whales, made me sail gently on all the seas; the vul- tures, turned anti-vultures, carried me on their wings towards the heights of the heavens. Magnificent was the description of the beauties, the pleasures, and the delights of the spirit and the heart in the phalansterian city. — Ion Ghica My Affairs have been editing a magazine now for almost exactly sixty years. I hope to live a good while longer—life expectancy is shooting up so fast that now, at age eighty- Iseven, I may still not have reached my halfway point. Yet sixty is the sort of number that leads one to reflect. Not reflect very deeply, necessarily. My thoughts so far have mostly been limited to “My God, that is so many years” and “Hooray for not having expired.” But it is quite a bit of time, and it is shocking to me that there is still living flesh atop my skeleton (a rather grotesque way to put it, sorry). So many pictures have formed and dissolved before my eyes, so many events that once drew my absolute attention are now forgotten. To think of all that has happened! I have fifty books to my name, but not one of them is autobi- ographical. Friends tell me I am now entitled to the indulgence of a memoir. But I am not trying to tell my life story. For one thing, my “autobiography” is dull as can be. While I have met many remarkable people, and seen countless extraordinary things, it has not been a life of adventure and escapade. That is by choice: I am a homebody and a bookworm by disposition. I am still, after all these years, unnerved by flying. God only knows how I shall feel if 4 My Affairs I am chosen to embark upon that Great Voyage abroad. (Of course I put my name down—wouldn’t anyone?) I prefer my burrow. A cup of tea and a slice of Victoria sponge. Sitting out on the gallery watching the plants grow. In college, my Latin American History professor used to repeat the cryptic phrase “Brazilian history is written from the hammock.” If so, I aspire to emulate the great Brazilian historians. Vigorous exercise, yes. But travel—not so much. For one thing, I’m always misplacing something en route. Last time it was my handkerchief. The time before that it was my granddaughter. (She was found.) So I do not want to tell you too much about me, for I find myself uninteresting and doubtless you would agree. Instead, I am mostly concerned to record my observations of the times through which I have lived. I have been fortunate, supremely so, to bear witness to some of the most rapid changes in human history: the dawn of the internet, the onset of the Climate Crisis, the Trump Presi- dency, the Red Wave, the Reaction, the onset of Gna, the collapse of Canada, the spread of the DSW, the establishment of the Pub- lic Times, the New Global Rights Framework, the decline of the “nation-state,” the creation of the GHS, the decommodifcation push, the (disastrous) cloning of the Beatles, the exile of the titans, the hideous collapse of the Galt Village and subsequent renation- alization of the moon, the birth of the first Pleasant City, the rev- olution in architecture, the museum disseminaton movement, the closing of the last prison, and, of course, the birth and progression of the Great Voyage ahead. My personal life may not have been a swashbuckling and adventuresome one, but I have certainly had the curse of interesting times. Lately I have been trying to recall what it felt like to live before any of this. It is not easy. Once history has happened, it seems inevitable. You can’t imagine it being any other way. It can be hard even to convince yourself that it was any other way. What My Affairs 5 is written is written. Yet if you had told me what was about to unfold, back when I was starting out in publishing, it would have been impossible to believe. Frankly, if you had described the world of 2018 to the me of 2008, it would have seemed unbe- lievable. But things were only just beginning to get remarkable. I don’t know why I should still feel surprised, but I do. The people of 1905 would have been astonished and horrified by the world of 1945. Or compare 1985 and 1945. The whole world alters every few decades, why should I have expected it to slow itself? Human beings lived the same way for tens of thousands of years. Then we started living in different ways in every generation. It’s disorienting to experience this. I have been fortunate that most of what I have been here for has been positive. So many people who have lived have not been afforded the kind of life I have had. They have died in childbirth, or starved to death, or been sent to war, or spent 40 years toiling for the company only to be laid off with a week’s pay. Compare the 20th century to the 21st, and who could take the 20th? So far, except- ing some blips of misfortune in the first few decades, we seem to have turned things around. William F. Buckley, a conservative fogey once renowned, said that he was “standing athwart history, shouting ‘stop.’” I have been marching beside history saying “Well done, can I get you anything?” I write this book in part, however, to show that it could have gone in a much different, much darker direction, and to encourage us not to take our achievements for granted. You may be familiar with the magazine I run, Current Affairs. At one time around midcentury we had the second-highest circula- tion of any print periodical in the contiguous United States, after Jacobin. (In Alaska, the Alaska Advertiser has consistently beaten both of us.) Nowadays, in a post-localization media landscape, a magazine like ours is less in tune with the public taste. Circulation 6 My Affairs is back around 100,000, which is where I like it. It is my fervent hope that I do not come across a tedious old fool in these pages. Perhaps I won’t. For one thing, I am not really “old”—if the actuarial tables are right, I am still downright larval. But tedious and foolish, well, that is for you to decide. I think, given the awesome nature of what I have experienced and wit- nessed, my recollections may offer the present and future reader some value. If not, I set them down here for the sake of the record. u u u u e can skip the early years. Needless to say, I was born. I Wloafed about a bit. The years from 0-5 were largely unpro- ductive. 5-10 was where things really hotted up. I received the fin- est education Southwest Florida had to offer, which was probably worse than nothing. Universities were attended. Friendships came and went. I enrolled in graduate education at the nation’s premiere institute of learning. I was not asked to leave Harvard. Rather, I left and was asked not to return. I had reasoned, soundly, that one’s graduate work could be done just as profitably from a balcony in the French Quar- ter as from the Yard, and so soon after enrolling I had retreated southward. My advisor emailed from time to time, asking when I planned to show myself again in the quadrangle. I replied to only some of these notes, informing him that because the internet had not yet been introduced to New Orleans, it would be impossible for me to maintain regular correspondence. Eventually, he gave up the attempt. A year later, the University sent me a polite letter ter- minating my formal relationship with it. I sighed, but by that time my attention was firmly on other things. There was a reason for this inattention to my studies. I was not one of these types who comes to New Orleans to sleep until noon My Affairs 7 and write poems about magnolias. I had come because it was the Cultural Capital of America, and to a young man seeking success in the publishing industry, I thought there was no better place to be. It turned out, however, that this was a personal delusion of my own, and had nothing to do with the truth. By the time I arrived in the autumn of 2015, all of the big newsmagazines had relocated to the two major coasts.